Dante's Numbers

1

It was Saturday morning. The weather was warmer. August beckoned. Costa woke in Maggie Flavier’s apartment, then drove to Greenwich Street to help the rest of them pack. Their flight home would be late that afternoon. He would travel to Barbados the following Monday. There were still some private business events on Maggie’s calendar. The job never seemed to disappear completely. Simon Harvey’s death continued to stand between them like some unspoken obstacle. Perhaps time would deal with that, time and a move to a different place, one with no connections, no memories. He was unsure.

But at least the case appeared to be, if not closed, at least partly resolved, probably as much as it ever would be. Roberto Tonti had scarcely ceased speaking to Gerald Kelly and his team since he was taken into custody. The SFPD had passed on the details to Falcone, since Gianluca Quattrocchi had been recalled to Rome with his officers to face an internal inquiry. Quattrocchi’s private approach on the night of the premiere was only one of the revelations the director was now minded to disclose. He had also confessed to being the originator of the tontine scheme to save the troubled movie in Rome, and to diverting Harvey’s secret publicity scam about fictitious threats to the production into a real and murderous conspiracy. His motive, he said with no apparent shame, was purely selfish. Inferno was by no means a guaranteed success, even with Harvey’s incessant hype. Something else was needed and, as Tonti knew this was the last movie he would ever make, he was prepared to go to any lengths in order to find it.

He had named Josh Jonah, the photographer Martin Vogel, and the Lukatmi security guard Jimmy Gaines as the principals in the plot to murder Allan Prime. Vogel had arranged the poison for Maggie Flavier. Jonah had then approached the photographer after being blackmailed over his involvement in the plot. Tonti had promised them Prime would be the only victim. He had hoped that would be the case, and that the halfhearted attempt on Maggie Flavier’s life, which he had not expected to be successful, would merely gain yet more publicity to keep the movie in the headlines. The deaths of Jonah and Vogel he regarded as accidental, if fortuitous. He claimed to have shot Tom Black — who had never understood the true nature of the scheme — himself, from a viewpoint near the Embarcadero, and then disposed of the weapon.

Dino Bonetti’s role remained unclear. The producer had disappeared the night of the premiere and was now the subject of arrest warrants for fraud and attempted murder. Tonti, however, steadfastly refused to discuss his involvement in the conspiracy, dismissing it as minor. The credit, as he saw it, was to be his.

In spite of the man’s age and frailty, he remained in custody, though Kelly was minded to waive any objections to bail provided Tonti surrendered his passport and reported to the police on a daily basis. The medical reports indicated that he had, at most, a few months to live, and would never face trial. There was no question, either, that the man would wish to flee to Italy, in spite of Gianluca Quattrocchi’s promises. The truth, Kelly felt, was that Roberto Tonti had achieved what he wanted.

The SFPD phone lines had burned with calls from TV networks and newspapers pleading with Tonti to go on air or give lengthy press interviews. From the major newspapers to the prime-time celebrity shows, he was, suddenly, in demand. This, it seemed, was worth a succession of lives, none of which the dying man deemed of any great value. Only his own reputation, his legacy, mattered, and by force of circumstance, that would always be tied to a single movie, Roberto Tonti’s Inferno.

Hank and Frank Boynton had been round for breakfast when Falcone returned from Bryant Street to brief them on what he’d heard from Gerald Kelly. All of them at the table — the Boyntons, Teresa, Peroni, and Costa — listened intently, and then the Italians stayed silent.

Hank, however, raised a forefinger and said, by way of objection, “But just a minute—”

“Not now, Hank,” Teresa stopped him, mid-sentence. “We’re finished here.”

“But—”

“Not now.”

“The movie business,” Frank grumbled. “He couldn’t take being behind that camera all his life, watching others get the fame. What was that line from Dante he spouted after he killed that poor bastard in front of everyone?”

“ ‘Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars,’ ” Costa said.

“Envy. Greed. This insane craving for fame.” Frank Boynton shook his head then got up from the table. “Come on, brother. These people have things to do.” He looked at Teresa. “That invitation to Rome still stands?”

“Whenever you boys want it.”

“Good. Have a safe journey home. All of you.”

They watched the two men leave. Ten minutes later Catherine Bianchi arrived and offered them one last drive round the city before a farewell lunch in the Marina.

2

Costa almost fell asleep in the minivan as it wound through a city landscape he felt he now knew well. The views across to Marin County, the great bridge, the hulking island of Alcatraz … It would be hard to shake San Francisco from the memory for many reasons, good and bad. Then he remembered he had something to return. It was sitting in a plastic grocery bag he’d brought along for the purpose. When they stopped at a light, he reached forward and placed it on the console between the front seats.

“That belongs to Gerald Kelly. Tell him thanks but I didn’t need it.”

Catherine Bianchi took a look at the handgun in its leather holster. “Lucky you.”

Her dark eyes wandered to the tall lean figure in the passenger seat. Something had changed between these two. Falcone sat next to her looking relaxed and perhaps a little bored. He was no longer the ardent pursuer and had already talked wistfully that morning of work back in Rome. Yet, as his eagerness waned, Catherine Bianchi’s, it seemed to Costa, was beginning to surface, rather too late in the day.

“Is everything good?” she asked with a brittle, edgy ease.

The question was principally aimed at the man next to her. He scarcely seemed to notice.

They were travelling along Union towards Russian Hill, trying to make a left turn, when, after her third attempt to start a conversation, Catherine finally lost patience.

“Listen,” she snapped. “I may never see any of you guys again. Ever. And all you can do is sit there moping. What the hell is the matter now? What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing,” Falcone remarked, turning to look at her.

“Then why are you … all of you …”

She muttered something beneath her breath, then added, “You might at least look a little grateful this mess is over. That someone’s in custody, admitting to the whole damned thing. Loose ends all tied up. Case closed.” She glanced at Falcone. “Tickets home all booked.”

The Italians squirmed uncomfortably on their seats.

“The loose ends aren’t all tied up, Catherine, and you know that as well as the rest of us,” Teresa said before anyone else could. “All that’s happened is that Tonti’s stuck up his hand and said, ‘Send it all my way.’ Which is very convenient in the circumstances. But …”

“But what?”

She was too late. The dam had burst. Peroni got in next, aware, perhaps, that there was likely to be a queue.

“I was under the impression we weren’t going to talk about this. But since we are, let me say just one thing. Tom Black was shot from a considerable distance by someone using a hunting rifle. Either Roberto Tonti is quite a marksman or he got very lucky. Have you seen his eyes? How he shakes? I don’t believe he could do that. Not for one moment.”

He was getting into his stride. “Also … how did he know Tom Black was in that car with Nic in the first place?”

“He says Black called him beforehand asking for help,” she snapped.

“But why?” Peroni asked. “If Tom Black knew Tonti was behind the whole thing … Oh, I give up.”

Falcone smiled pleasantly in the passenger seat and said nothing.

“Carlotta Valdes,” Costa added abruptly. “Who was she? Where is she now?”

Catherine Bianchi turned around, looking cross. “He won’t tell us, Nic. The guy’s just confessed everything and that’s that. Are we supposed to lose sleep over it? Whoever that woman was, she didn’t do much. Maybe roped in Allan Prime and brought Tonti a gun on-stage at the Palace of Fine Arts. One more fake ID among many. Trust me. Kelly’s people have checked. They could spend a lifetime chasing someone who was nothing more than some two-bit courier. And they even will, for a little while. But not for long. Do you blame them? Don’t you have priorities in Rome, too?”

“It’s the name,” Costa emphasised, not quite knowing what he meant, struggling to place a memory. “Why that name?”

“Because of Hitchcock,” Teresa insisted. “As I’ve been trying to tell you all along. Tonti worked with him. It was all here …”

The vehicle came to an abrupt halt by a busy junction. Catherine Bianchi slammed her hands angrily on the steering wheel.

“You people make me want to scream. Why, in God’s name, do you have to make everything so complicated?”

Falcone finally took his gaze off the ocean horizon. “We didn’t. We never had the chance. The fact that film was made here—”

“This is San Francisco! Movie central!” she yelled. “Haven’t you noticed? Watch.”

She jerked out into the street, cut left onto another road, then bore right again.

“Dirty Harry,” she chanted. “Bullitt. Mrs. Doubtfire, The Joy Luck Club …”

“Eastwood and McQueen—” Teresa cut in.

“Shut up! Harold and Maude, Freebie and the Bean, Pal Joey … Am I making my point here? It’s not all dark and bloody. Remember The Love Bug?”

The Italians stiffened and glanced at each other.

“The Love Bug?” Teresa asked eventually. “You mean the kids’ movie?” She winced. “The Disney one?”

“The Disney one.”

“Like Bambi,” Costa murmured, still trying to place the recollection that was haunting him, one that was buried somehow in that dark night that had ended in bloodshed outside the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.

He was amazed to see that the road they had entered bore the name Lombard, just like the broad highway that became Route 101 as it swept towards the Golden Gate Bridge. Here, however, it was narrow and residential. Then they crossed a broad cross street and Lombard became a one-lane road that turned into a crazed series of steep switchbacks winding downhill past grand Victorian mansions and newer apartment blocks.

“Tourist time,” Catherine announced as she wheeled the big Dodge easily around the tight hairpins, the vehicle grumbling over the brick road. “America’s crookedest street. Architecturally speaking, of course. Most of the people around here are upstanding citizens, with plenty of cash, too.”

The street straightened and became smooth asphalt once more. She pulled in by the junction at Leavenworth and looked back over her shoulder at the winding lane behind.

“Recognise anything?” she asked. “That little Beetle Herbie came down here. Lots of movies came down here. After L.A., this city is the biggest movie stage in the world. So what’s the big deal if someone steals the name of a movie character now and again?”

Costa wasn’t looking back. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, seeing something he recognised. There was a city map in the seat back; Costa took it out, scanned the index, found what he wanted, ran his finger across the ganglion of streets that crisscrossed the crowded, confined peninsula of San Francisco, a complex patchwork of neighbourhoods, each running into the next, overlapping, obscuring the obvious.

“Drive on, please,” he said. “Ahead. Indulge me.”

The view ahead changed shape, becoming more like the one he expected. Costa asked her to stop at the next junction. Opposite was a plain two-storey house with scaffolding along the side obscuring the long windows of what must have been some kind of living room. The curtains were closed. A builder was working on the exterior, setting up a cement mixing machine.

Tom Black’s words kept coming back to him.

They screw you up … they screw everyone. Scottie. Me … I never thought this’d happen. Not when we went to Jones …

There was a scene in the movie … Jimmy Stewart’s character stared out from his living room window towards the Bay Bridge, admiring this very view fifty years before from the building across the road. This was Scottie’s old home on Lombard, the very building Hitchcock had used. The front, with its long living room window, was on a street called Jones. Someone who didn’t know might think that was its real address.

Tom Black hadn’t been talking about a man, Costa realised, cursing his own stupidity. He’d been remembering a place. Somewhere he’d met a movie-obsessed individual who’d stolen his name from Vertigo.

He climbed out of the car and walked across the road. The builder was a big man, his hands smeared with plaster, his face wary, full of suspicion.

“I was wondering if Scottie was in,” Costa asked as if it were the most natural question in the world. “I heard the lucky bastard got some nice old car from somewhere. He promised to show it to me when I was in the neighbourhood.”

The man looked him up and down carefully. “Only his friends call him that. Never seen you before.”

“Been a while.”

“Mr. Ferguson went out this morning. I don’t expect him back while I’m here, and I’m here all day.”

“The car?”

“Remind me …?”

“Green. Jaguar. Nineteen fifties? Scottie said it was a beauty.”

That broke the ice.

“Oh, it’s a beauty, all right. I guess that’s why it hardly ever gets out of the garage. Bad luck, though — it’s not here today.”

“Where …?”

“I don’t know.” He took off his hard hat and scratched his head. “Maybe it’s at that theatre of his. Don’t know …”

“The theatre?” Costa asked.

“That weird little dump on Chestnut, down the Marina. The one with the tower. How the hell Scottie manages to make a cent out of that …”

Costa picked up a steel-headed mallet from the side of the concrete mixer.

“Now,” the builder said, “let’s not do anything hasty …”

The door looked so old he felt sure Jimmy Stewart had touched it. People made things well back then. It needed three swings to smash through the hardwood slab.

3

The package arrived at ten, along with the man from the movie festival offering to give her a ride to the event. Maggie Flavier glanced at the box in his hands and asked, “Costume?”

He was in his early thirties, sturdy and very clean-shaven, with soft, pale skin that belied his heavy, calloused hands, worn jeans, and white T-shirt. A pair of thickset black plastic sunglasses sat on his face.

“The festival people said …” he began.

“They didn’t mention anything about a costume to me.”

She didn’t know what they’d said. She couldn’t remember. This engagement had been on her schedule for weeks. Her agent had arranged it while she was filming in Rome.

He took off the glasses. Bright blue eyes. Too blue. She wondered if they were coloured contacts. Hangers-on at the fringes of the business sometimes had affectations, too.

“If it’s a problem … forget it. They went to a lot of trouble to get this dress. They said it was important. But if they screwed up …” He shrugged.

“What am I supposed to be doing?”

“My name’s John,” he said, smiling pleasantly, and holding out his hand. “John Ferguson.”

She shook it. He had the strong grip of a workman.

“What am I doing today, Mr. Ferguson?”

“Marina Festival of Fifties Noir. Sponsored by the local organic supermarket, a bank branch, and an arts foundation. Opened by Miss Maggie Flavier. Fifteen minutes in public, a couple of smiles, and you’re done.” He peered at her. “You do know the Marina Odeon, don’t you?”

“Sorry. Movies are work, not leisure. Also, I never quite hit the Marina scene. It’s a ways from here.”

“Ah …”

“Noir?” she asked.

“We open with Touch of Evil and close with The Asphalt Jungle. Talk about doing things backwards, but I just fetch and carry. Programming’s someone else’s job.”

He put down the large cardboard dress box and extracted a slip of paper from his jeans pocket.

“According to my schedule you cut the ribbon for the opening at one-thirty, then we show the Welles film at two. You don’t need to stay after that, if you don’t want to. We have one reporter and one TV crew. No one else will be allowed inside. We got the message from your agent about not wanting too much press there.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “And if we get there quick, no one’s going to be outside either. The festival people would like to get a few words from you first for some DVD they’re putting together. Just a few questions …”

He nodded at the box. “It’s all for charity, you know. Gorgeous dress. I got the limo around the corner.”

“Why do I have to wear the dress?”

“Came from some society lady in Russian Hill. Of the period, or so they say.” He sighed and shrugged again. “I’m just the messenger here. I’m sorry. After all this awful stuff I read about in the papers, I understand if you don’t feel up to it. If you want to cancel, just say so. I can tell them … It’s no problem.”

“No, no …” Maggie hated letting her fans down. It seemed so selfish, given the money and acclaim she got in return for what, in truth, was a small amount of talent and a lot of luck.

She opened the box, took out the garment, and found herself wondering for a moment whether to believe what she had in her hands. The dress was a long, voluminous silk evening gown, low cut, the kind of thing glamorous women wore in old movies. It was a dark, incandescent green. The same green as the one in Vertigo. It was so beautiful she could scarcely take her eyes off it.

“What is this?”

“They said it’s a copy of one Janet Leigh wears in Touch of Evil.”

That was a film she did remember. The sight of Orson Welles’s fat, sweating face looming out of the Mexican darkness was hard to forget.

“I thought that was made in black-and-white.”

“Well, I guess the movie was. Not the clothes. What do I know? Don’t shoot the messenger, remember?”

She hesitated. The death of Simon Harvey and the dark succession of events that preceded it had exhausted her. She felt tired and uncertain about the trip to Barbados. Uncertain, too, about what might come afterwards …

She remembered Scottie’s nightmare from the movie, of falling into a deep, shapeless abyss. Vertigo. It wasn’t just fear of heights. Vertigo was fear of the unknown, too.

“We need to go, Miss Flavier,” the man insisted, gently. “If you want to. The limo can’t wait forever.”

One last appearance, and then some space. Some time to think about who she really was, what she really wanted …

“Do you want me to put it on now?” she asked, looking at the dress in her hands.

“Nah. There’s a dressing room at the theatre.”

He carried the box carefully in his arms, following her all the way down to the parking lot.

“We’re just around the corner,” he said, beckoning her to the back of her apartment block.

They turned a corner and she saw the car.

The green Jaguar gleamed in the half shade, sleek and old and full of memories. She remembered the smell of the leather and the drive with Nic up into the heights beyond the Legion of Honor.

“What the hell is going on here?” she started to say, swinging around to look at the driver.

The sunglasses were back on. He’d dropped the big cardboard box. He was grinning at her. There was no one near, not a window overlooking this place.

He was getting something out of his pocket.

“It’s the final act,” the man who called himself John Ferguson said. Suddenly he was on her, strong arms around her neck, a hand pushing some cloth that stank of damp, corrosive chemical into her face.

She tried to struggle. Then she tried to breathe. Her arms flailed wildly, to no purpose. She could hear him laughing.

As she started to fall, she could just make out the sun, bright and wild in a pure blue Californian sky. The world started to turn dark. For one short moment the sun glittered high above her. Then the cloth came down once more. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. He held the thing over her mouth, choking her until she submitted and fell into the dark.

4

Once inside the house, Costa wasted fifteen seconds fumbling for a light switch, then he threw open the curtains on the long flat panes that covered the corner of the room abutting Lombard and Jones, revealing a view that, through ancient venetian blinds, took him back to Maggie Flavier’s apartment, watching Vertigo for the second time in a matter of days, both of them feeling the past tapping on their shoulders like some hungry ghost.

This wasn’t just the same building. It was the very room they’d seen in the movie, with its beautiful hillside vista out to Coit Tower and the ocean. The furniture had been carefully selected from the same era: a pale fabric sofa, long, low chairs of 1950s design. Even a small TV set with manual rotating dials and switches and a bulging, pop-eyed screen. An old-movie channel was playing on it: something black-and-white, the sound turned down as if the room needed to be inhabited by the cinema even when no one was present. It was a sanctuary, a kind of temple, and it was instantly obvious what was being worshipped here.

The walls were plastered with movie posters from floor to ceiling. All from the fifties to seventies. American, English, Italian …

Teresa went round them methodically, finger on the old paper, checking the names.

“Roberto Tonti worked on every one of these,” she murmured. “Whoever this man is, he knows his stuff. Tonti doesn’t even get a credit on the Vertigo poster, but it’s up there along with all the Italian horror flicks he directed. We have a fan here. The fan.”

“Rome.” Falcone was busily rooting through documents on the antique desk next to the TV. “He went there one week before Prime died and returned home the day after. Just like Martin Vogel and Jimmy Gaines. Look — plane tickets in the name of Michael Fitzwilliam, the bill for a hotel near Termini, cards for restaurants and bars. A receipt for a pair of sunglasses from Salvatore Ferragamo in the Via Condotti.” His grey eyebrows furrowed in bafflement. “Ferragamo don’t make men’s sunglasses, surely …”

“So we’ve found one more member of the tontine?” Catherine Bianchi asked.

“It would appear so. Ferragamo …”

“You’re right. They don’t make men’s sunglasses.” Peroni emerged from a spacious walk-in closet with something held almost tenderly across both outstretched arms. It was a set of women’s clothing fresh back from the cleaners, pressed and spotless inside plastic wrapping. A grey jacket with matching slacks. The same clothes they’d seen worn by the woman who handed a bouquet of flowers, with a gun inside, to Roberto Tonti on the stage by the Palace of Fine Arts. The same clothes apparently worn by the mysterious Carlotta Valdes when she appeared at the apartment of Allan Prime in the Via Giulia.

“He keeps his ladies’ things in the same cupboard as his men’s stuff. There’s makeup and a mirror. This is a bachelor apartment with a difference. Also, there’s this …”

He held up a photo of a man in hunting gear, his booted foot propped on a dead deer.

“When he’s not wearing lipstick, he likes to go shooting. There’s a locked firearms cabinet next door that could house a couple of rifles.”

“OK,” Catherine Bianchi said. “Now I am calling Kelly.”

From the bottom drawer of the desk, Falcone retrieved what appeared to be a plastic garbage bag wrapped with duct tape. He picked up a pair of scissors and cut the fastenings. From within he pulled out something swathed in white tissue paper.

As they watched, he unwrapped the death mask of Dante Alighieri.

The mask seemed very old and fragile, brilliantly lit by the bright Californian sunlight, a place Dante could never have guessed existed. Costa looked at the closed eyes, the face in peace after so much pain, the long, bent nose, the thin-lipped, intelligent mouth, and knew in an instant that it was genuine.

“This is our case, too,” Falcone said with obvious satisfaction. “Call Kelly. Tell him we need an immediate check to find out this individual’s real identity, and a discreet distribution of his description.”

He gave her the kind of look he gave policewomen in Rome, one she hadn’t seen before.

“I do not want to see this in the media. Not even on a police station wall. If this man can change identities so easily and convincingly, he’ll be gone the moment he hears.”

“Yes, sir …” she said caustically. “Anything else?”

Falcone ignored her. Teresa Lupo had returned from the kitchen.

“We need forensic,” she said. “ ‘Scottie’ may be finicky about his fancy clothes but his work gear is stuffed into one big pile in a basket just like any other bachelor slob.” She looked at them. “There are items in there with what I’d swear are bloodstains on them. And a pair of jeans that still smell of petrol. Martin Vogel’s apartment. There’s a lot here, Catherine …”

“OK, OK, OK. I’ll call …”

But she still didn’t. She looked at them.

“Who the hell is this nut? And how does he fit into the tontine?”

Costa walked over to look at the shelves in the corridor. There seemed nothing unusual among the collection of personal belongings. Souvenirs, from Mexico and Italy, some small pieces of pottery, a few photographs in cheap plastic frames. Everything was so ordinary. If you took away the posters and the incriminating evidence, this would simply be the apartment of a wealthy bachelor with a penchant for 1950s style.

He moved closer and picked up one of the photographs. It showed a tall, erect figure with a full head of dark hair, standing on the waterfront near Fort Point, beneath the grand span of the Golden Gate Bridge, squinting into the sun. He had his arm around a tall, spindly boy of perhaps ten or eleven. Neither was smiling. The man was a younger Roberto Tonti. The boy wore faded shorts, a cheap T-shirt. His hair needed cutting, his face was frozen in an expression of fear and anger.

There was a hook on the back of the frame. He unlocked it and took out the print. It was sufficiently recent to have a printed date still faintly visible on the rear: 8-24-87. Scribbled in thick, grey pencil, an adult hand had written a line Costa recognised …

The Inferno … “Does Roberto Tonti have children?” he asked Teresa.

“Only married once. Without issue, as they say.”

“That we know of, anyway,” Peroni said, studying the photo. “That’s a man and his son. Take it from me. They don’t see each other much. They don’t like each other much. But the same blood’s there and they both know it. You can see it in their faces.”

Costa thought he could make out some slight physical resemblance in the two narrow, lost faces.

“Scottie … Ferguson,” Peroni went on. “Whoever lives here is Roberto Tonti junior, living and working under another name just a mile or so from his father. He must be thirty or more by now.”

Catherine Bianchi was finally starting to punch the buttons on her phone. She looked up at them, excited, maybe a little anxious, too.

“Better not touch anything else, folks. I’ll be collecting unemployment if they realise I had this guy under my nose all along and never even noticed.”

Costa replaced the photograph. “No one would have noticed. That was the point. He was just one more extra in his father’s scheme.”

A player who, like the others, ceased to discern the line between what was real and what was invented. Everything in the apartment — the posters, the photos, the movies on the TV, the frantic scribbling on the walls — spoke of obsession. A compulsion that had prompted this man to take at least two false identities, one of them the name of Jimmy Stewart’s character in an old movie in which his father had been a minor technician, to buy an old green Jaguar and lend it to an actress in the hope of … what?

He thought of the mythical Scottie dogging Madeleine through the San Francisco of five decades before, peering at her compulsively through the windshield of his car as his curiosity turned to an irresistible desire, until the moment she fell in the ocean and then woke naked beneath the sheets in a scene meant to take place in the bedroom of this very apartment.

Some memory tweaked an anxious nerve. In Vertigo, Scottie had watched the sleeping, naked Madeleine avidly from the sofa in the living room, through an open door. The real door was closed.

Costa opened it and stepped over the threshold. The room was almost pitch black. Just the barest fringe of light seeped through what must have been a large window opposite, one blocked by heavy opaque blinds.

He found the switch and flipped it. In his astonishment he was scarcely aware that the others had followed and stood behind him, stunned, too, into silence.

This was the bedroom from the movie, copied with a precise and compulsive eye for detail. There was the same set of bureaus by the door, four small framed paintings on the facing wall, a plaid chair in red and white and brown.

And the bed. A double bed with a high walnut veneer foot. The sheets and pillows were as crumpled as they had been when Madeleine Elster was woken from beneath them by a phone call, puzzled, but not entirely ashamed of her nakedness after being rescued by Scottie from the Bay. In his own mind Costa half believed he could smell the ocean at that moment, rising from the creased linen.

But it was the walls that worried him. They were covered in photographs. Not of Kim Novak or anything else from Vertigo. It was Maggie Flavier, everywhere, so altered in some that he barely recognised her until he found the courage to stare into the frozen eyes of the figure they depicted and see that same mixture of courage and fear and resignation he had recognised in her from the start.

Some were so old they must have predated her acting career. There was one in which she stood with a group of schoolgirls outside Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, not far from her home. Maggie was immediately recognisable even though she couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Just another child among many, prettier, more striking than the rest, with a woman behind her, pale, sick-looking, a hand on her shoulder.

Costa turned away and forced himself to look at other photos. Maggie as a bright-faced girl on a farm, as a poverty-stricken teenager, as a rich young lady in an English mansion. And then the new images. The adult woman: her beauty strangely marred, as she moved through a series of roles that, seen in this cruel, linear fashion, in this gloomy private shrine, only underscored her fall from the innocence of childhood into a fragile, haunted maturity. No longer smiling, but looking now into the camera with a hatred that was sometimes pure and vitriolic, her face stared back at them from the walls. And her body, too, in some of the more lurid shots, blown up to display every open pore, every inch of her skin, its minor imperfections, the faint, discernible penumbra of blonde hair rising above a posed, bare arm.

There was scarcely an inch of the room that wasn’t covered with her presence in one way or another. The photographs spanned, as far as he could make out, almost two decades, from child to woman. Costa couldn’t take it anymore. He turned away, trying to grasp the memory that lay just out of reach.

When he tried to call her, there was no answer. He phoned Sylvie Brewster, her agent.

“It’s Nic,” he said urgently. “Where’s Maggie’s appointment today? I need to know.”

“You mean you didn’t think to ask over breakfast?”

“Please …” he begged.

The woman put him on hold for a moment, then came back and told him. Costa knew already somehow, and what he’d do. There could be no more police standoffs. Because of the police, the actor Peter Jamieson had died outside the Cinema dei Piccoli. So, in a way he still didn’t fully understand, had Tom Black.

The rest were still in the bedroom. He could hear their quiet, low voices, Falcone’s more prominent, more commanding.

Kelly’s team from Bryant Street couldn’t be more than a few minutes away.

Without saying a word Costa walked over to the desk, found Catherine Bianchi’s bag, and took the keys to her Dodge. Quickly, silently, he walked through the open door and down the stairs.

The sun was brighter than ever. The builder was back at work. Costa slid into the driver’s seat and worked the unfamiliar automatic vehicle out into the road. As the minivan wound round the side streets back to Chestnut and the long straight drive to the Marina, his hand reached over into the passenger side, found the glove compartment, flicked it open, and fumbled inside.

Gerald Kelly’s gun was still there.

5

She woke beneath the wrinkled sheets of an uncomfortable old double bed pushed hard against the corner of a cramped office that smelled of damp and sweat. As she tried to clear the fumes of the drug from her nose and throat, choking and nauseated, Maggie Flavier felt at her own body automatically, fingers trembling, mind reeling. She ached. She felt … strange.

Then she opened her eyes, knowing what she’d see. John Ferguson, whoever he was, sat opposite, his arms leaning easily on a chair back, watching her squirm as she tried to force herself upright on the stiff mattress. It took one look at herself to confirm what she suspected. She was now wearing the strange green dress and nothing else. He must have stripped her while she was unconscious, then put on the old silk garment.

She tried to move but something stopped her and it hurt. Rough brown rope, the kind construction people used, gripped both her wrists. He’d tied her to the iron bed-head, loose enough to let her move a little, but not much. Not enough to get off the bed entirely.

He had an expression on his face that suggested he knew the panic that was running through her head, and a part of him liked it. But there was some uncertainty there, too.

“I told you it was a nice dress.” He reached for a packet of cigarettes tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt, took one out, the last one, lit it, scrunched up the pack, and threw it on the floor. The smoke rose into the blades of a rotating ceiling fan performing lazy turns above them.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Where the hell am I?”

“You had an engagement. Don’t you remember? Booze and boyfriends getting to the old grey cells now?”

“There’ll be people here soon. Just let me go now and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

He closed his eyes for a moment as if he despaired of her.

“That’s what I love about movie people. You’re all so damned wrapped up in yourselves you never check stuff out, do you? Someone calls and says”—he put on a high-pitched girl’s voice, like Shirley Temple on drugs—“ ‘Miss Flavier. Oh, Miss Flavier. We love you so much you just got to come open our little noir festival in some flea-pit movie theatre you wouldn’t normally’ ”—the real voice came back—“ ‘ deign to set foot inside.’ And you don’t even think to check it out.”

He flicked a finger at the face of his watch.

“Why I say, I say …” She recognised the new voice. It was a cartoon character, fake Southern gentleman Foghorn Leghorn. “… I say, boy … festival folk don’t turn up till four in the afternoon. Till then ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”

He leaned forward. “I hope you enjoy my voices, Maggie. I’ve been working on them for a while. All my life, if I’m being candid.”

She hitched herself up on the bed, knees together beneath the sheets, taking the rope as far as it could go before the harsh hemp began to bite into her skin, and said, “Your voices are very good.”

“We have scarcely scratched the surface, dahling …” he groaned lasciviously.

She recognised this new look. It was one she’d known since she was a pretty little teenager. He was staring at her as if she were meat.

“Here’s a question,” he continued. “You wake up stark naked except for that dress and you realise some guy you don’t even know put it on you. At least there is a dress. Not like Madeleine, huh? There she was all … bare … in Scottie’s apartment … nice apartment by the way, play your cards right and one day maybe you get to see it. Well?”

“Well what?”

“Why didn’t Madeleine scream? Some complete stranger takes her home, puts her in his bed, takes her clothes off …”

She didn’t rise to the bait. This flustered him.

“I mean he must have looked, didn’t he? Maybe more than just looked. How would you know? If you were out cold like that?” A pink flush briefly stained his cheeks. “How would you know … If … if … he’d d-d-done the real thing. All the way. You must know, right? You’d feel something. I guess.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“But what about if he just kind of … fiddled around?” He sniggered. “Got some touchy feely in there.” He shook his head, laughing out loud now. “You ever think of that? Jimmy Stewart perving all over Kim Novak while she was out like a light and him all hot fingers, runny, runny …” He was licking his hands, slobbering all over them. “… runny … runny. And she never even knows.”

He stiffened up on the chair and stopped laughing.

“Or does she?”

John Ferguson, which was, she now recalled, the real name of the character Jimmy Stewart played, leaned forward and screamed at her, “Does she?”

“They were actors. None of it was real.”

His face, which had seemed so ordinary, wrinkled with hate and disgust.

“Now who’s being naive, Miss Flavier? You of all people. Telling me a little of the story never makes its way into real life. Truly, I am shocked.” It was a new voice, that of a doctor or a prim schoolteacher.

Beside the bed there was some kind of storage cabinet. On it stood film cans lined up like books next to a small office desk with a phone on it, a cheap chair, and not much else. A dusty window almost opaque with cobwebs. A door opposite that led … she had no idea where. They had to be in the movie theatre. But even so, she could only picture one part of it in her head: the big white bell tower looming over Chestnut.

If she could just get to the door, fight him off long enough …

“What do you want?” she asked.

He shook his head as if that was a way of changing something, whichever character possessed him.

The voice altered again.

“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking … you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

Taxi Driver.

“I don’t know who I’m talking to, but I don’t think it’s John Ferguson,” she said quietly. “Or Travis Bickle.”

His head went from side to side in that crazy fashion again. He blubbed his fingers against his lips and made a stupid, childlike noise.

“Yeah. That’s the problem. You don’t know, Maggie. And you should. Because knowing means you get to answer the conundrum.”

“The conundrum?”

“You know. The conundrum.”

She stared at him, baffled. He sighed as if she were a stupid child.

“The fuck-you-kill-you conundrum,” he said, wearily.

Maggie Flavier’s mind closed in on itself, refused to function.

“You do know what that is, don’t you?” he said.

“Tell me,” she said softly.

“Fuck you then kill you? Fuck you or kill you.” He placed a finger on his lips, hamming a pensive pose. “Kill you then fuck you, even?” He giggled. “Though if I’m honest, the fuck-you part is a little moot. Let’s face it: whatever way things work out, that’s gonna happen.”

He leaned forward, looked very sincere, and added, “I’ve been waiting a very long time for that, Maggie. Keeping myself … pure. While you got banged by anything that grabbed your fancy.”

There had to be a weapon somewhere. Or something she could use. A kitchen knife. A ballpoint pen. Anything she could stab him with when he came close.

“Who …” she asked, very slowly, “… are … you?”

“Like you want to know.”

“I do.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He shrugged, got up, walked over to the little desk, rudely swept away a pile of papers from the surface, and then scrabbled around until he found what he wanted. Then he came back, sat down again, eyed her once more. Maybe not quite so hungrily. Not quite.

“My name … my real name,” he said quietly, “is”—the voice became liltingly Irish now—“Michael Fitzwilliam. ‘Fitz’ in the Gaelic sense, meaning bastard, sans père for you froggies, illegitimate, mongrel, wrong side of the blanket, born out of wedlock, or even love child, if you happen to be of a humorous or gullible disposition.”

She found it hard to breathe. She was remembering something from a very long time ago.

“Sure and the name has jogged a little memory now, I’m thinking.”

It was a terrible Irish accent and meant to be.

He had something in his hand. She didn’t want to see it. But there was nowhere to run, and she felt hot and tired and weak beneath the old dress that was tight in the wrong places.

Michael Fitzwilliam — Mickey, hadn’t they called him that? — threw a piece of fabric on the bed and she couldn’t not look at it, couldn’t take her eyes away.

Notre Dame des Victoires was on Pine Street, four blocks from the Brocklebank Apartments, though that wasn’t why her mother chose the school. It was the only one in the city that offered daily classes in French conversation and writing.

She stared at the school badge, faded with age, pinched between his fingers. A white fleur-de-lis inside an oval shield with a red and blue crown at the centre. She thought of the name Mickey Fitzwilliam again. Now the memory had a face attached to it, that of a sad, lonely, unexceptional child, one who bragged constantly of his famous father yet always refused to name him.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

His head lolled around his shoulders, his eyes rolled in their sockets, a bad comic actor’s “come again?” routine.

“Is that it? ‘I’m so sorry.’ Me, the poor little bastard you all laughed at, teased, and fucked with. No dad. No money. Just a drunk for a mom and a …”

She could hear it before he even spoke, rattling around her head from across the years.

“… a st-st-st-st-st-stutter …”

Mickey Fitzwilliam, who so wanted to be the same as the rest of them and never could. She’d made sure of that.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“You will be. You’ve got to be. Really sorry, Maggie. Not acting sorry. I know the difference. I had a director for an old man, and in between times when he was pretending I didn’t exist, I got to watch him and learn. Got to know how he worked. Got to learn your tricks over the years. Can’t fool Roberto Tonti’s kid now, can you? Not some two-bit actress who got where she is by handing out a quick fuck on the casting couch to any wrinkled old producer who demanded one.”

“That is not true!” she screamed.

He sat there, smiling, unmoved. “No. It’s not true. So what really got you where you are, Maggie? Do you remember?”

She’d heard that question a million times, from a million different showbiz hacks.

“A little luck,” she said automatically. “A little bit of talent.”

Mickey Fitzwilliam gazed at her, then shook his head. “You’ve got to remember better than that, Maggie.”

He reached down beneath the foot of the bed and his hands came back up with a knife in them. The blade was long and clean and shiny.

“It’s what the fuck-you-kill-you conundrum hangs on.”

6

It was Saturday morning, shoppers’ hell. The traffic started bad and got worse. He was still ten minutes from the theatre when it finally ground to a halt. Up ahead, through the snarl of cars, he heard the wail of a siren and his heart fell. Then a couple of very shiny red fire engines battled their way into the angry mass of stalled machines blocking the breadth of Chestnut. Costa pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road and climbed out.

People were coming out of stores and offices to stand in the street to gawk. There was a cop there, in uniform, looking bored.

Costa caught his attention.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Fire down at Fort Mason. Stupid contractors lousing up or something. Or maybe the insurance. That place always was bad news.”

A fire. Not an emergency call to the little theatre further down the road on Chestnut. Maybe he had still had time.

“Is the street going to be blocked for long?”

The cop grimaced. “Sadly, my psychic powers just fail me there, sir. You can’t dump your vehicle like that, by the way. You’ll have to wait for this train wreck to clear just like everyone else.”

He’d put on Gerald Kelly’s leather shoulder holster. The black handgun sat snug against his chest. If this cop had been any good, he’d have seen it already.

“Thank you, Officer,” Costa said meekly, and went back to sit behind the wheel of the Dodge.

When the stocky blue uniform crossed the road, wending his way through the choked cars and buses, he climbed out again, looked down the street, past the idle bystanders clustered on the sidewalk. In the distance, crowds of shoppers milled on the sidewalk outside the stores, wandering into the road, darting in between stalled cars the way Romans did in the Corso on a Saturday afternoon.

He took one look at them, saw the cop was returning, looking angrily at Catherine Bianchi’s abandoned Dodge, and then began to move, falling into a steady pace as he wound through the growing throng of bodies, on into the Marina.

7

She did remember. It was all there. Just hidden, waiting to be let out into the light of day like an old poltergeist freed from the basement.

It must have been September. She could still feel the heat. Seventh-grade boys and girls, out on a trip to Crissy Field, doing the things schoolkids did. Working a little. Playing a little. Teasing …

Maggie Flavier could still picture herself on that bright distant morning, thin as a rake but tall for her age and with a look about her that turned men’s heads. She tried not to notice. She felt alone and a little unhappy in San Francisco. This was her mother’s idea, not hers. To flee Paris and an estranged father, to try to find some new life halfway across the world in a city where they knew no one, and had, as far as the young Maggie could see, no clear idea of what the future might bring.

She’d danced at the stage school in France, and men looked then. Her mother had watched and taken note.

They were so kind in the church school on Pine Street. They smiled a lot and listened to her. They didn’t mind she hated trigonometry and algebra and preferred to dress up and play on the stage instead, always inventing something, stories, characters, voices, situations, imaginary people she created to fill the void inside.

These small and seemingly useless talents mattered, her mother told her. Because of the auditions. She spoke the word as if it possessed some magical power. As if it could save them. The young Maggie had no idea how. All she understood was that she possessed a burning, unquenchable need to be noticed, to be applauded. By her peers. By her mother, more than anything.

The notes had been coming for weeks, always unsigned, always written in a crude childish hand on cheap school notebook paper. They were, young Maggie thought, beautiful in a simple, babyish way. Flowery language. Sometimes bad French. Sometimes, she thought, better Italian, which she recognised from lessons in Paris. They were never coarse or dirty, like some she’d received, and some the other girls sent from time to time. All they spoke of, carefully, indirectly, was love. As if there were an emotion somewhere waiting for her to discover it, like a hidden Easter egg, a secret buried in the ground. Something ethereal, something holy, distinct from the hard, cold physical reality of the life she knew. She didn’t really understand the words or the poetry, some of it so old she found the verses unreadable. So she threw them away mostly, until the last.

Had this unseen admirer written, simply, Margot Flavier, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime, then, perhaps, she would have tried to understand. But nothing was that clear and sometimes the language was so florid, so odd, she thought it was a joke. Sometimes it scared her a little. She was young, she was exiled in a foreign land, with a strange and unhappy mother who wished to push her into a career about which she felt unsure, not that her doubts mattered for one moment.

Naturally, she told the girls. Barbara Ronson. Louise Gostelow. Susan Shanks. The trio who ran the class.

Naturally, when the final note arrived, they had an idea.

That last message came the day after she’d gone to the first successful audition of her life, taking time off school for the short flight to L.A. with her mother, spending hours reading the scripts, trying to make her fast-improving English bad again for a group of men and women who seemed to demand that. Afterwards, when they waited at LAX for the flight home, her mother had made a call on a public phone. When she returned, her face glowed with a happiness Maggie had never seen there before. Maggie had the part. Françoise in L’Amour L.A. A life mapped out in a single day, not that she knew that then, not that she felt anything much at all, except pleasure that this had produced joy in her mother.

Maggie had been surprised. She thought she’d fluffed her lines and failed the audition.

The next morning, she came into school and found the note tucked into the seam of her locker. It read, Tomorrow at Crissy Field I will reveal my love.

Barbara and Louise and Susan had gawped at the scrawled, nervous handwriting, giggling, and then concocted the plan.

Out on the hot, dusty sand dunes of the Marina the following day, they’d played it out. While the rest of them walked with Miss Piper, making notes about the grass and the lizards and the birds, Maggie had detached herself, looking distracted, knowing full well what would happen.

Finally the teacher headed for the public washrooms, ordering them to wait. Maggie walked to one of the small huts owned by the park service and stood in its shadow, out of the burning sun. It took only a minute. Then he was there, staring at her, his plain face getting redder and redder, voice tripping over itself, his eyes, which were not unattractive, skittering over the pale, drifting sand, avoiding hers.

“Maggie …”

At that moment she didn’t even remember his name. He was just that boy. The one with the stutter and the cheap clothes, the one whose father was something big and famous, not that anyone was allowed to know his name.

“Oui?” she’d asked.

He bowed his head, held out his hands, and tried to speak.

All that came out was “I lu … lu … lu … lu …”

It happened so swiftly she didn’t have a chance to intervene, even if she’d possessed the courage. The three girls burst out from their hiding place and formed a ring round him, hands locked, eyes wild with glee, chanting, mocking.

Strapped to an old, hard bed in some place she thought was a shuttered movie theatre in the Marina, the adult Maggie Flavier could still hear that heartless song, see them dancing round him, a jeering circle of coarse, hard cruelty, eyes wild, voices cackling, taunting, chanting rhythmically …

I lu … lu … lu … lu …

I lu … lu … lu … lu …

I lu … lu … lu … lu …

She could see the way he’d stared at her, see how his bewildered eyes filled with tears.

Then the boy ducked beneath their arms and she’d watched, heart beating wildly in her chest, as he tore away down the beach towards Fort Mason, shrieking with shame and fury until his cries mingled with those of the gulls that hung in the sea air as if pinned to the too-blue sky.

She didn’t speak much to Barbara and Louise and Susan afterwards. She blamed herself for showing them the letter in the first place. She wished, more than anything, to apologise to the boy. But it was impossible. Mickey Fitzwilliam never came to school again. He had no friends, and the teachers, when she asked, refused to tell her where he lived. For a while he was a burden on her conscience. Then other things intervened. Trips to L.A. to the TV studios. Work. A career. Her mother’s growing frailty.

From that point to now …

She tried to imagine the distance, the journey, and couldn’t. Not for herself. Certainly not for Mickey Fitzwilliam.

8

I lu … lu … lu … loved you,” he stuttered, clutching the old school badge.

“We were thirteen. We were just children.”

“I loved you!” he roared.

She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Did you never ask yourself why it was that day? Why then?”

“I was a child. I didn’t ask myself anything.”

“He was the p-p-producer. Roberto. My dad.” The head was shaking again but there was only one voice left now, a young, frail one that sounded hurt and damaged. “He gave us money. He came by from time to time. Didn’t want to see me. He just wanted my mom. That’s all.”

“I don’t understand …”

“He wanted to give me something. To ease his conscience. So I told him about you. About how you danced and acted and sang. About how beautiful you were. How your mom wanted to get you into show business. Everyone knew that. I got him to give you the audition. I begged him to give you that part. That was me.”

“Thank you,” she said simply.

“You were good, even then. Everyone wanted to look at you. They couldn’t stop.”

She whispered, “ ‘But ’oo can blame Françoise?’ ”

“Don’t play those games with me,” he snarled. “I saw you. On the TV. Going around town. You never even noticed me. I watched you.” He stared hungrily at her. “I watched you change. All those nice parts in the beginning. The good girl. Sweet dreams and apple pie. Then … That first time you … t-t-took off your clothes.”

“Mickey …”

“Do you know what that did to me? Do you even care?”

She shook her head and said, “I did not know you then. I do not know you now. If I had …”

“While you were banging half of Hollywood, I was there. Didn’t touch another human being. Not once. Waiting.”

“Mickey, please …”

“I stood outside the TV studio all night long sometimes. I knew what was going on inside. None of those bastards loved you. Not your actors and your rich guys and your pimps. Not some stupid Italian cop …”

“Stop this now!”

“I watched you every day of your life. On the screen. In the papers. On the Net. I was right there next to you in a store, an elevator, at the movies. You never noticed, did you? Never had a clue what you owed me. Why the hell do you think Roberto cast you for Inferno in the first place, huh? Some washed-up has-been dodging in and out of rehab so fast even the papers had given up on you? Why’d he pick you of all people?”

“Because I can do my job,” she insisted, mainly to herself.

“So can a million other pretty women, all of them younger than you. I asked him. I begged him. One more favour for the bastard son. Keep him quiet. Ease an awkward little situation. Got to say that about my old man. He still has a Catholic sense of guilt somewhere, even when he’s murdering people. You know when he came along and wanted someone else removed from that sweet scam of his, to keep up the coverage in the papers?”

She didn’t want to listen to this. She didn’t want to think about it.

“I screwed it up on purpose. I sent out Martin to get that almond stuff knowing you had that hypodermic handy.”

“I could have died.”

“If I’d wanted it, you would have. Don’t you see?”

It was the last thing she needed, but the tears were beginning to prick in her eyes. “In God’s name … what is it you expect me to do?”

“Fuck-you-kill-you …” he whispered. “Lu-lu-love you. I waited so long for this. Twenty years. I didn’t want you to hate me. I made you, Maggie. I rescued you. I still can. There’s just the three of us left now. Me, you, and my old man — and he won’t be around much longer. Millions and millions and millions of dollars. It could last a whole lifetime. For the two of us.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, exasperated. “I don’t understand …”

“The scam, dummy. The one that jerk Harvey wrote you into when you were too bombed to notice. Once my old man’s dead, there’s a place in the Caribbean we can fly, walk in a bank, pick up the whole bundle, everything that was meant to go to him, to Harvey, Martin, those Lukatmi losers … It’s all ours, Maggie. No more work. No more worry. You don’t need to go down on some jerk in a director’s chair. I don’t have to slave away in construction until my old man calls and tells me to go do his dirty work. Everything will end perfectly. Don’t you see?”

He didn’t stutter when he felt confident. He didn’t even look terribly threatening.

“Talk to me some more,” she said. “Come closer.”

Mickey Fitzwilliam laughed nervously, then patted down the sheets at the foot of the bed. He sat down, very stiff, very nervous.

“See, Roberto said this whole thing was really all for me in the end. The money. The tontine. All I needed was to cut the numbers a little.”

He snickered like a child and looked, briefly, proud of himself. “Well, a lot actually. Josh and Martin … that was pure improv. They came by my place bleating about how it was all going wrong … how scared they were. Pissed me off. Next day I just sent Josh a stack of letters demanding money and made it look like they came from Martin. Easiest thing in the world. Morons. They thought I was there to, like, mediate. You believe that? Then that idiot Tom Black calls me when he’s on the run.”

Another voice, high-pitched. Terrified.

“ ‘Scottie, Scottie, ya got to help me. Like you promised …’ ”

A dark, malevolent gleam flashed in his eyes.

“I hate dumb people. Told my old man afterwards. Know what the great Roberto Tonti said? That I got lucky. That I oughta shut up. He’d take care of it. See me right. Call that luck? Does anyone get that lucky?”

“I’d call it fate.”

He smiled. “Me too. This was meant to be, Maggie.”

He scanned the room as if he was looking at something he despised.

“Roberto gave me this theatre. My inheritance. Bullshit. He couldn’t make any money out of this dump. All these things … they were supposed to be his way of saying sorry. I’m not stupid. It was always about him. That scam was … his pièce de résistance. His big moment. Going out in a big blaze of glory. Look at me, Ma! Top of the world! All those years behind the camera. All those years watching actors get the applause. It ate him alive …”

“I saw that.”

“You did?”

“It was obvious. Tell me more.”

He inched a little closer and looked at her left leg, bare, half askew on the bed.

“I never touched a woman before. Not till today. When you were sleeping.”

Maggie Flavier gave him a stern look. “That’s not nice. Touching a woman when she doesn’t know.”

“I’m sorry. I just …” He shook his head. “I couldn’t stop looking at that movie after my dad gave it to me back when I was a kid. Vertigo. It was the first piece of work he did in America, you know. I watched it right away, to please him. Said it was his movie, too, in a way. Then I saw you and you lived in the same place. It was like …”

He ran his tongue over his lips as if they were dry. “I’d watch it every day. Twice, three times sometimes. Got it in French and Italian, too. I could sit here and tell you every second, read you every line.”

He gazed at her, frankly, greedily. “After a little while it was you I saw, not some dumb old actress no one’s ever heard of. You in that car. In that dress.” He blushed again, looked younger. “In bed, in that apartment. My apartment. Bought it with my own money. Robbed a bank in Reno. Self-made man. Wasn’t taking everything from Roberto. I got my dignity.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “That movie … it kind of got inside me.”

“They do sometimes.”

He edged closer still and, as she watched, gingerly put his hand on her knee, looking all the time, anxious for her approval. His fingers closed on her skin, squeezing, as if she were some kind of lab specimen.

“Not hard,” she told him. “That’s not nice.” She held up her arms, with the rope dangling from the wrists. “This isn’t nice.”

She leaned forward as if to kiss him. The rope was just short enough to stop her. She moved back into place with a sigh.

“A woman can’t make love tied to a bed. Not a good woman. That’s what hookers do. Dirty women. I don’t want to be a dirty woman. I won’t do that. Not for anyone.”

“I–I-I d-don’t want that, Maggie. I never wanted that. All that fuck-you-kill-you stuff. Jesus … All I wanted was to be with you. Like we should have been from the beginning. Now we’ve got the money, we can …”

His words drifted into the nothingness of acute embarrassment.

“We can what, Mickey? Tell me. Please.”

“We can be like normal people. A couple. We can live where we want. Paris, maybe. On a desert island. Or a farm in the country with a-a-animals …” He squeezed his eyes shut and blushed. “Kids maybe. All in good time. We don’t have to do it right now. I don’t expect that. I just … sometimes. Sheesh. Sometimes I’m not me.”

He took his hand off her knee, then mumbled, “We don’t even have to do it till after we’re married. I’d like that. It would be the right thing. In the circumstances.”

“In the circumstances …” she echoed, cursing herself for letting a little of her fury show, glad he didn’t notice. “I can’t kiss you if my hands are tied, Michael. Can I call you Michael? Is that OK?”

“If you like.”

He looked at her, mouth open, a little idiotic. Then he went back to the chair, scrabbled on the floor, came back with the knife, and sat next to her on the bed.

“The reason I never messed with girls is my old man told me. They screw with you. They fuck your head. They gobble up your whole life, until one day there’s nothing left.”

“Some girls. Not all.” She held out her hands. “It depends how you treat them.”

“Yeah.”

He reached over and sawed through the loop of rope on her left wrist, then her right.

“I didn’t tie them tight, you know. I didn’t want to hurt you. Not ever.”

“I realise that.”

She took his right hand, the one with the blade, slipped forward, angled her body against his, heard his breathing catch, turn short and excited.

“Are you going to hold a knife even when you kiss me, Michael?” she crooned.

“Oh …”

He looked at the thing, shamefaced, then released it. She heard it clatter on the floor, and then, before he could even look at her again, Maggie Flavier was on her feet, trying desperately to remember some of the things she’d learned in the few self-defence classes she’d taken a couple of years before.

But her mind was a blank, so she did what came naturally. She jerked back her arm and elbowed him so hard in the face that the blow sent something electric running up and down her funny bone, and she screamed.

Mickey Fitzwilliam crumpled, clutching at his nose. Blood leaked out between his fingers. He was moaning and whimpering like a child.

She didn’t wait. She ran to the door, jerked on the handle. The door didn’t budge. There was an old-fashioned key in the lock. In her mind’s eye she was already rushing outside, into the bright, safe world, screaming at the top of her lungs for all her life was worth.

The trouble was the key wouldn’t turn.

He was curled on the floor near the bed, snarling at her, a different Mickey again, the one who’d been there when she regained consciousness. The one who snatched her, stripped her, put her inside someone else’s old dress, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.

He didn’t care that snot and blood were pouring down over his lips, dripping off his chin.

“Guess that solves our conundrum,” he said in a nasal slur.

9

He was staggering to his feet, stumbling toward a glass cabinet on the wall. It was marked In Case of Fire and contained an axe, set diagonally against black fabric, like some kind of museum exhibit.

Mickey Fitzwilliam smashed his fist through the glass. Blood shot out from his fingers as the pane shattered. He didn’t seem to notice.

Praying to any god who might save her, Maggie scrabbled at the key. It finally turned. The door opened and she dashed through. It was pitch dark. Her hand flailed against the wall, her fingers somehow found a switch. A dazzling light burst on her from a single bulb that dangled from a wire not more than a hand’s width from her face, momentarily blinding her.

Escape had taken her into a small, square room entirely without windows or furniture, nothing but plain whitewashed brick. A rickety-looking wooden staircase rose against the white, dusty wall opposite. A dark corridor led off to the right, maybe to nowhere.

A picture came into her mind’s eye, one kept there from the times she’d driven down Chestnut on the way to the shops or Roberto Tonti’s grand mansion opposite the Palace of Fine Arts.

She knew where she was instantly. Inside the fake bell tower of the Marina Odeon, the one pretending to be the campanario of San Juan Bautista.

Breathless, trying to think straight, she ripped the key out of the lock and slammed the old wooden door shut, enclosing herself in the tiny room. Hand shaking, fingers fumbling, she got the key into the lock on her side of the door and managed to turn it. She pressed her cheek to the edge of the door frame and whispered, “Michael, Michael …”

There was no reply.

“You’re sick,” she said deliberately. “Let me help you.”

Was she serious? Was she acting? She’d no idea.

“I can help. There are doctors …”

Silence. She tried to catch her breath. She looked up the narrow wooden staircase winding up the interior of the fake bell tower.

Face against the wood, trying to sound calm and in control, she said, “Talk to me, Michael. Please …”

The axe blade crashed through the flimsy old timber, inches from her face. She shrieked. The sharp, gleaming metal withdrew, and he began battering again, repeatedly, maniacally, tearing a ragged hole through the panel, sending splinters and dust everywhere.

She retreated to the other side of the tiny chamber, staring at the growing breach he was tearing in the last barrier of defence she possessed. The world was closing in on her and it was one that seemed to be composed entirely of clips from movies, half-remembered lines of dialogue, flashes of recognition that veered between fact and fiction.

The next thing she knew, she was stumbling down the dark little corridor, praying there might be some way out at its end. She had plunged into darkness. Her fingers crawled along the damp plaster, seeking a switch. Finally they found one; she flipped it and felt a raw, painful scream leap into her throat.

Ahead of her was a naked man. One part of her panicking mind could recognise and name him, although he looked so different, so altered. Dino Bonetti was trapped upright in some kind of tall glass cabinet, the kind they had in restaurants for desserts and ice cream. The producer was still alive, barely, moving a little, mumbling wordlessly. At his feet was a round paper object the size and shape of a football. It seemed to be spewing a constant stream of yellow and black shapes that flew in and out, only to find themselves cornered in the cabinet alongside Bonetti. A cloud of furious wasps buzzed around him, crawling across his florid, swollen face as if feeding, pulsing thick, like a living carpet, on his chest.

His fist banged weakly on the padlocked glass. He could see her, just. There was a putrid, vile smell leaking from somewhere. She edged back, towards the foot of the tower.

As she stumbled against the door joist, there was a brutal, vicious crack. Mickey Fitzwilliam was through, his face a rictus of amused savagery, so close she could feel the spittle from his mouth fall like hot rain on her skin as he leered crazily through the gap.

There was nowhere else to go. She stumbled towards the staircase, knowing somehow what role he would choose next: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a performance twice removed, an actor mimicking something else from the real-unreal world of show business.

“ ‘Here’s J-J-Johnny!’ ” Mickey Fitzwilliam screamed.

10

At the end of his long run to the movie theatre, Costa found the front door locked and not a light on anywhere. He opened a low wooden gate and worked his way to the back of the building.

There was no obvious entry point at ground level, only rough plaster walls and the white tower rising three storeys or more into a cloudless sky. Close by — this he hardly dared look at — stood an old cemetery headstone over a grave marked out by pansies and daisies. A grey urn was positioned before it, filled with red roses. A green sash was wrapped around the stems.

Out of breath, lost for a way inside, he heard a scream, then another.

Then he heard Maggie’s voice. A man’s name, over and over again.

Michael, Michael, Michael …

He knew in an instant where she was: behind the fake adobe wall, just a few short steps away, trapped with the man who’d covered the walls of his bedroom with two decades of her portraits.

Next to the base of the tower was a small window so grubby and littered with cobwebs it was opaque. He searched the trash-filled backyard until he came across an old, discarded sink, hefted it in his arms, stumbled through the rusting junk back to the building, then, with a desperate lurch, threw the thing through the glass. It landed on the far side with a muffled crash. Picking up some rusty piping, Costa roughed out a gap through the shards of glass remaining, wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief, reached inside and pulled himself through. He found himself spread-eagled across an old office desk, reached ahead, gripped the edge of the wood, and dragged himself forward until he was mostly free of the spikes and scattered glass.

There was a bed in there, the sickly sweet smell of sweat, and a misshapen red puddle on the grimy floor.

Some second sense made him turn. A man stood in a doorway at what appeared to be the foot of the stairs of the tower. He had a bloodied face and hands and wore an expression of surprise and contempt.

His right arm held a long, fireman’s axe, which, as Costa scrambled from the desk, began to fly, turning, turning, turning, towards him through the air.

Costa found himself dropping like a sack onto the hard concrete floor. Bells chimed, pain flooded into his temples. Maggie was there, somewhere beyond his assailant, screaming. He’d landed on his right shoulder, which hurt like hell. Maybe something was broken. After a brief, sickening moment of blackness, Costa found himself amidst a sea of shattered glass trying weakly to recover the gun from Gerald Kelly’s leather holster inside his jacket. He rolled and came face-to-face with the axe. The blade had driven itself deep into the wood less than an arm’s length away from his head. The fall, painful as it was, had saved him.

When he got half upright, onto a single knee, gun in hand, with a clear view back towards the tower, he was alone.

Costa staggered towards the tower, his head throbbing, his body convulsed in a single painful ache.

“Police!” he bellowed, stumbling through with the kind of unguarded, careless bravado that would have got him screamed at in the state police academy in Flaminio. “Police!”

Laughter drifted unseen down the rickety staircase.

Maggie cried in an echoing scream, “What do you want?”

There was a noise to one side, down a gloomy corridor, a sound like someone rapping on glass. Costa glanced that way automatically, seeking its source. What he saw sent his mind reeling. At the end of the narrow passage, illuminated by a single swinging bulb, stood an upright glass cabinet. Inside, a naked man was banging weakly against the glass door. Around the trapped man’s bloated, livid body swarmed a thick, angry cloud of buzzing insects.

“No time,” Costa murmured, and pointed the gun at the cabinet. He heard a thin frightened screech from the figure locked inside, then saw him fall, shrieking, arms clasped around his head, to the cabinet floor.

Costa fired twice. The cabinet exploded. Glass, wasps, and finally the bloodied, torn husk of a human being tumbled outwards, into the hot, fetid air.

Costa couldn’t wait to see any more. Maggie had gone ominously silent. Trying to take the stairs two steps at a time, he stumbled and fell, splinters tearing at his fingers, the pain ricocheting through his shoulder. The gun slipped rattling from his grasp. Back at the bottom again, he recovered the weapon and scrabbled up the staircase.

“What do I want?”

Not Maggie’s voice. A man’s voice this time.

Costa staggered ever upward, round and round the twisting corners of the staircase, until, panting, exhausted, he reached some bright, sunny platform, clinging onto the banister for support, aware that, once again, he wasn’t alone.

Maggie crouched in the far corner, clad in an old-fashioned dress the colour of an emerald. Above her stood the bloodied man, a knife in his hand, his face twisted with pain and fury.

“Put down the knife,” Costa snarled. “Stand away from her. Do as I say and no one will get hurt.”

The man across the room didn’t even seem to hear him.

“What do I want?” he asked again. “To be happy, Maggie. Is that so freaking much, huh?”

The blade was high over her, frozen, gleaming. A spiralling swarm of wasps rising from below was beginning to work its way into the room.

“You’re sick, Michael. I’m sorry, so sorry. Please, please, listen to me …” She was weeping, choking, and there was more than fear in her voice, Costa thought; there was regret there, some kind of recrimination and self-hate. “Let me help. Let me help you …”

Costa snatched a frenzied glance around him. Ahead was a single arch the height of the room, open to the blue sky, with a ledge outside so narrow only a bird could stand on it.

“How can you possibly help me?” the man with the knife demanded.

Maggie, crouched in the grime on the floor, knees bunched before her, arms around them, was a tight, terrified ball of misery.

“I’ll do whatever’s needed,” she said in a low, weak voice. “Whatever …”

Costa raised his gun. He aimed straight through the shaft of bright sun that separated them. A cloud of yellow and black insects danced in the dusty golden air.

“Move away from her,” he ordered. “Do as I say.”

“He’s sick …” Maggie whispered. “Please, Nic, can’t you see he’s …”

A voice came into Costa’s head, and it was Emily’s, repeating the words she’d uttered moments before his hesitation ended her life by the side of a crumbling monument that stank of cats and the homeless, a rank, pungent stink that would never leave him.

“Don’t beg,” he said, so quietly he knew this was for himself, not her. “Never beg. It’s the worst thing you can do. The worst …”

The knife didn’t move. The weapon in Costa’s grip didn’t waver, not even when something small and dry crawled across his extended hand, paused, and thrust its sting into the soft, taut flesh between his index finger and thumb as he gripped the gun.

A hot, sharp spike of pain that he barely noticed.

The man ahead moved, just a fraction, turning to look at Costa, something new, a look of doubt maybe, in his eyes. Another vicious yellow and black creature crawled across Costa’s forehead, stabbed its poison into him, got crushed in an instant as he swept its carapace into his skin with the back of his hand.

“You know …” The voice didn’t match the tortured face of the figure with the knife. It was anonymous, anybody’s, nobody’s. It drifted dreamily around the bell tower. “I was thinking …”

Costa’s first bullet struck him in the left arm, near the elbow. The shattered limb jerked like that of a rag doll. The jumping man screamed. So did Maggie Flavier.

The second shot flung his body hard against the rotting wall and, for a moment, Costa didn’t know where he’d hit him. So he kept on firing, jerking on the sweaty trigger constantly, desperate to empty the weapon into this husk of a man as the pained shape jerked and shrieked across the room until he came to block the searing California sun at the long bright archway, still upright, just, still holding the knife.

“He’s sick …” Maggie screeched through her hands, beseeching someone, him, the wounded man.

Costa scarcely heard her. All he heard at that moment was his dead wife’s voice and the buzzing of a million tiny wings.

“Drop the knife.”

It was spoken quietly, calmly, and he didn’t wait for a reaction.

He pointed the gun across the room, dead straight, hand steady, and pulled the trigger. The shot caught the man who called himself John Ferguson in one life, and Carlotta Valdes in another, full in the chest. The impact blew him out of the tower, backwards into the unforgiving brilliance of the day.

The room went quiet. He could hear her weeping and knew, in a sudden revelatory instant, there would never be anything he could say to heal the hurt.

Costa crossed the room. He walked out onto the narrow ledge three storeys above the tiny garden that sat among the junk and debris in the shadow of the bell tower of the Marina Odeon.

Heights didn’t scare him. Nothing scared him much anymore. Only the big unknowable things, life and closeness and the fragile bond of family. He stood in the high open arch of the counterfeit campanario of an imaginary Spanish mission house and peered down over the dizzying, exposed edge.

Below, on the bright grass, next to a shattered grey urn strewn with scarlet roses, a broken body lay exposed before the headstone of Carlotta Valdes, like a corpse that had worked its way out of the grave below.